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Andrew R Zentner

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Research

I am a theorist with research interests that lie within cosmology, defined rather broadly. I strive to maintain a close connection with observation in large part because the amount and discriminating power of observational data is expanding rapidly and will continue to expand into the next decade. My aim is to make predictions that are unique and testable in the near term and to facilitate comparisons with data that are robust and maximize the discriminating power of the data. In many cases, this leads to studies of the particular capabilities of forthcoming instruments to study any variety of phenomena, from dark energy evolution to galaxy formation processes. My interests range throughout a broad cross section of cosmology to encompass galaxy formation, the phenomenology and identification of the dark matter and dark energy, and astrophysical limits on fundamental physics.

My group at the University of Pittsburgh is active and growing. I currently work with four graduate students: Andrew Hearin, Mei-Yu Wang, Advait Salgarkar, and Shailendra Vikas. I recently hired Christopher Purcell as a postdoctoral research associate. Two undergraduate students are also involved in my group's research, Rebecca Reesman and Katlyn Daniluk. My research group is funded by the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy.

I joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall of 2007. Prior to entering into theoretical cosmology, I received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. I received my Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 2003 under the direction of Professor Terry Walker. I was then an Institute Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago from Fall 2003 until Fall 2006. I was a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kavli Institute and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago from Fall 2006 until moving to the University of Pittsburgh.

I maintain a wiki page to archive some of the work done by the astrophysics and cosmology group at the University of Pittsburgh. You can view our University of Pittsburgh google calendar to keep up with astrophysics and cosmology events in our group and throughout Pittsburgh. You can check my scheduled meetings and availability here.

I have organized and will chair a special session on cosmology at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Pittsburgh. The details can be found at the APS web site .I am also interested and active in community education and outreach projects and encourage interested parties to contact me directly regarding such projects.

Biases in the Gravitational Lens Population Induced by Halo and Galaxy Triaxiality,Eduardo Rozo, Jacqueline Chen, and Andrew R. Zentner,Accepted for Publication in The Astrophysical Journal, 2008On the arXiv